Choke Metrolinx’s Diesel Death Plan

Sign the petition to oppose Metrolinx’s plan to build an eight fold expansion in diesel rail traffic, from 50 trains per day to over 400 trains per day, in the Georgetown corridor which cuts through west-end neighbourhoods including, Liberty Village, Parkdale, Roncesvalles, The Junction and Weston.

This expansion will make this the busiest diesel-rail corridor on the planet.

Exhaust from diesel locomotives is a known danger to public health, linked to cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, cancers and premature death.

Sign here: http://www.cleantrain.ca/petition.php

Comments

#1 kiwano : You're doing that Toronto

You're doing that Toronto thing where an incremental improvement (those 350 extra trains are all supposed to be passenger trains, which will displace a lot of private automobile traffic) gets shot down because it's not a perfect improvement, and we end up stuck with no improvement at all.

If you want electrification, keep the messge on electrification. Don't give auto lobbyists a foothold to get a public transit project killed (because they will; hell thanks to the recession, the provincial government is now a major shareholder in 2 large car companies).

Remember that opposition to the Front Street Extension is why we still have the elevated portion of the Gardiner Expressway (sure the Front Street Extension had problems, but there's no way that the entire Gardiner was just going to end at the Jameson ramp).

If the rail corridor gets expanded with diesel trains, the public health problems will create an impetus to electrify in a few years anyway. Stick to the message that these trains should be electric, and we'll end up with electric trains. Keep spewing this message that we shouldn't have diesel trains, and we'll just have private automobiles instead.